rary formulas. And Stendhal was pre-eminently courageous.
He wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit
of fearless liberty.

It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the
freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require from him many acts of faith
of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope,
it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and
renunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and
inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. We are inclined to
forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as
distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly
barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the
discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in
the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern
writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach
seriously the art of fiction. It gives an author--goodness only knows
why--an elated sense of his own superiority. And there is nothing more
dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his
feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted
moments of creation.

To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the
world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so. If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed
to rise superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist
who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the
first condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no such
great matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a
hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a fire-arm; many other
qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either
one or the other. Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred
thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I would
ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a
tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him
impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors. I
would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose
fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as
ridiculous or terrible. I